Most professional athletes participate in cardiovascular screening to identify often-asymptomatic heart disorders, but the debate continues on whether to mandate ECGs as part of pre-participation screening for student athletes. Photo courtesy of Play for Patrick.

Wearable devices used in this study. The colors for different human figures indicate the specific studies in which each person participated. Red figures represent participation in all five studies; grey figures represent participation in the activity and insulin studies; blue, the activity, insulin sensitivity, and inflammation studies; orange and yellow, activity and air flights; green and pink, inflammation; and purple, air flights. Image courtesy of Li, et al, Stanford University.

Use of traditional Holter monitor leads can be an issue for patient compliance and comfort. The newer generation ambulatory cardiac monitors use a small, adhesive patch that sticks directly on the patient's chest and allows them to shower and go about daily activities without a belt mounted monitor or leads getting in the way. This is especially important for longer term monitoring of seven days or longer.

The FDA has concerns about the cybersecurity of implantable medical devices with wireless connections for patient monitoring or adjustments to how the device functions. Changing the function of an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) using wireless access to the device could present a major patient safety issue.

An example of the new generation of inexpensive, wearable cardiac monitors that are seeing increased usage. This is the Cardiac Insight Cardea Solo device. After the monitoring period is over, the wearable patch is torn open to retrieve a data pod that is inserted into a reader to download the data. The software automatically creates reports based on the data, complete with waveforms for various cardiac measures.

Dynamic ECG waveforms displayed on an iPad using McKesson's mobile ECG viewer, which directly connects to the hospital's cardiovascular information system or ECG management system. This technology can help speed triage of STEMI patients, allowing diagnosis anywhere, rather than requiring cardiologists to walk down to an emergency department or drive into the hospital to view the ECG.